Book Review: The Camp Fire Girls

Review of Helgren, Jennifer. The Camp Fire Girls: Gender, Race, and American Girlhood, 1910–1980. University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 372 pp. ISBN (hardcover) 978-0-8032-8686-3.

By Cheryl Weiner, Lesley University

Girls’ youth movements hold a special place in the fabric of American history. Dating back to the early twentieth century, they have played a formative role in shaping girls’ social identities and their sense of self. Jennifer Helgren brilliantly chronicles the history, origins, and evolution of the Camp Fire Girls, one of America’s longest-serving girls’ youth movements, in her newly released book, Camp Fire Girls: Gender, Race, and American Girlhood, 1910–1980. She calls attention to historical research, including photographs and oral and written communications, that chronicles the origins of the movement, its impact on girls’ lives, and how it adapted to and resisted dominant ideologies about girls, culture, and race across time. Helgren highlights how the movement’s mission and the populations it served changed over the decades and the internal tensions that ensued.

According to Helgren, Camp Fire Girls’ groundedness in white, middle-class values, and the constantly changing possibilities of who girls were and could be, posed constant challenges to its mission. These challenges are not unique; they were experienced within the feminist movement and within girls’ studies and feminist scholarship, which first centered on the experiences of white, middle-class girls and women, then focused on non-white girls from a problematizing perspective, and later included racial and sexual diversity in all its forms.

In the first chapter, Helgren describes how Camp Fire Girls was seeded in 1910 by Charlotte and Luther Gulick, a physician and physical education expert, who were parents to four daughters. They endeavored to instill a sense of “essential feminism” in white, middle-class girls ages twelve to twenty during a time when their home-making responsibilities were being lost to the forces of industrialization. The Gulicks sought to create a “new kind of young woman” who existed in the liminal space “between school and the home” (p. 2). Incorporated in 1914, Camp Fire Girls wedged itself into the emerging female youth space, glorifying the art of homemaking, self-education, and community service by bringing girls together, irrespective of race, religion, and class, to enjoy “feminine” outdoor activities such as camping and hiking. Girls received “honor beads” for achieving proficiency in these and other domestic tasks.

Camp Fire’s mission expanded and extended notions of girlhood by providing participants with practical skills training and health education in a community-oriented setting. While its membership predominantly extended to white, middle-class, Protestant girls, its commitment to diversity was revolutionary for its time. Camp Fire Girls’ progressive model of education was also hailed and supported by leading youth experts and philanthropists, including G. Stanley Hall and Jane Addams, among others.

As a service-oriented movement, Camp Fire aimed to instill a sense of national duty and patriotism in all participants. During World War I, Camp Fire Girls accommodated rapid expansion through its “Minute Girl” program, which allowed girls to register directly with the organization to support war-time activities, providing new opportunities for “healthy, useful girl citizenship” (p. 50) among girls. At one point, more than 700 girls joined each month, and they earned more than 1,500,000 service badges among them by caring for working women’s children and assisting with wartime fundraising.

However, the model was not unflawed. Helgren points out that The Camp Fire Girls often fell short on its mission to promote a colorblind ideology. The program appropriated Native American imagery and later mythologized aspects of Gypsy culture to foster a sense of community and belonging in girls and to evoke their inherent relationship with nature. Helgren explains, “Camp Fire leaders believed that individuals could reach a deeper level of spirituality by accessing what they assumed were primitive emotions” (p. 60). Program ideology encouraged girls to gather around campfires, wear Native American-style ceremonial dresses, and adopt Indian sounding names, while ignoring the lived experiences of Native American participants who had been absconded from their land and placed in residential schools. “Wohelo,” an acronym of the words “Work, health, and love,” served as the movement’s watchword.

In Chapter 3, Helgren identifies how elements of socioeconomic and racial elitism further pervaded Camp Fire culture. She observes that “Camp Fire was not as open to all girls as its founders asserted” (p. 90). Participation costs were high, and Camp Fire was “not a charity,” a point made in the 1914 Book of The Camp Fire Girls. In addition to membership fees, girls were required to purchase uniforms, buy membership booklets, and pay for camping trips. The movement believed that it could help immigrant and disadvantaged girls overcome the hardships of their circumstances by Americanizing them and training them to become more like white, middle-class girls.

In the World War II era, Camp Fire girls traded in their Native American-sounding names for patriotic ones. Girls babysat, taught food conservation methods, and helped in factories, jobs that they would cede to men upon their return from service. Camp Fire’s popularity grew among younger girls, who were called the Blue Birds. Camp Fire girls were known for their all-American looks and patriotism.

As threats of facism loomed large in the post-war period, Helgren indicates yet another shift to Camp Fire’s ideology. Under the leadership of Luther Scott, the movement began to align its values with theocratic religions, as evidenced by the inclusion of “worship God”’ into Camp Fire Law in 1942. The movement developed materials for use with Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic populations. Girls could also earn honors for participating in religious-based activities, which created yet another type of idealized girlhood.

While the 1950s and 1960s ushered in new possibilities for girls and women, Camp Fire maintained that girls’ primary purpose was to become knowledgeable homemakers, a manifestation of their biological destiny. Whereas other programs leaned into the feminist era, Camp Fire retreated from it. Camp Fire began to offer lessons on beauty, dieting, and dating, including “Dates with Dad.” Girls also learned vocational skills in case they needed to support themselves or to provide supplementary income to their families.

Helgren notes that Camp Fire remained a largely white-centered movement in the 1960s, even with the establishment of the Metropolitan Critical Areas Project (MCAP) in the 1940s, which aimed to increase membership among girls of color and girls with disabilities. Structural racism meant that white groups were given preferential treatment over Black groups, and that Black leaders were left out of critical decision making. Segregation was upheld in cities where it remained, and Camp Fire made little effort to facilitate or to promote cross-racial groups.

Helgren explains how the next few decades would reflect additional changes. In the early to mid-1970s, Camp Fire lost more than 100,000 members due to rising rates of divorce and changing interests among American youth. Camp Fire began to focus on building “character education” in disadvantaged youth of all ages. These programs were grounded in a white, middle-class framework, and failed to acknowledge individuals and organizations who were already doing this work. In 1975, Camp Fire launched the New Day program, which gave local groups autonomy over their own groups. In 1983, Camp Fire changed its name to Camp Fire Boys and Girls. It now operates on an international level and serves disadvantaged youth through a host of year-round programs. The Camp Fire Girls: Gender, Race, and American Girlhood, 1910–1980, is a must-read for anyone who is interested in understanding the history of youth movements, how girls’ identities are shaped by them, and how they are influenced by the social contexts around them.